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Were you paying attention in history class? Remember that time when Thomas Edison sent his evil robots after American inventors George Westinghouse and Nikoli Tesla? Remember how Tesla created a device to control the weather and take out Edison and his robots? Remember how Mark Twain narrated it all?

No?

Well, that's to bad because that is exactly what Thoughtquake Studios' Tesla: The Weather Man is all about. (Okay, so maybe the game is a work of "comedic" fiction, but still...)

The game, which looks painfully like a flash game one would find on some random low-budget website somewhere on the Internet, is a side-scrolling platformer where the player controls the weather-controlling inventor. Controls are simple, if not a bit clunky to use. Tesla moves via the WASD keys on the keyboard and his weather-controlling powers (lightning, gravity, etc.) are controlled with the mouse.

Movement (jumping included) feels mushy at best and the mouse controls feel much too loose to be considered good. In fact, this is one of those games where you have a nagging feeling at the back of your skull that's telling you the whole thing just doesn't feel right -- and it's not implying anything against the ridiculously bad storyline or the sub-par graphics.

On the topic of graphics, the game seems hand-drawn (and that's a credit to its developers). Unfortunately, it also comes across as extremely amateurish and a little bit fuzzy. Likewise for the audio. While the soundtrack is okay, albeit a generic, and the sound effects so-so, but the voicing is awful. Outside of the fact that it sounds like it was recorded using Windows Sound Recorder and a $7 PC microphone from Fry's Electronics, the actual voice acting (if it can even be called that) comes across as what you might hear from a few buzzed frat boys trying to be funny. You know the kind: the ones that talk in a bad British accent because they swear that they can sound just like a Brit. Like the gameplay, it's just unacceptable.

While the game, which is available as a digital download from GamersGate.com, costs only an arbitrary $3.33 to purchase, it's $3.34 too expensive for the product delivered. In fact, it might not even be worth playing if the developer were actually paying players that one cent to do so.